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Death is the way the old let go, leaving the young something to cleave to, to make new as they crawl out of the earth, becoming the home for the next life, unimaginable until it begins to breathe.
It was heavy in the heart of the room.
Their marriage was a meeting of minds, it didn’t matter so much where their bodies happened to be.
The hierarchy of grief is measured in words and silence. The closer the death, the less words can hold it.
They hadn’t come again, hadn’t kept knocking. It is the highest level of care, to keep knocking.
She had become heavy of heart, and hadn’t built the kind of friendships that could carry the weight.
A crumbling age. Maybe nothing would ever be built again.
She missed her father when she came across questions that would never be answered, not in his way. He told stories to say a word.
Heartbreak for the living is still full of possibility.
Marta was always apologizing, never being more careful.
Dune wondered if there was a factory somewhere that just produced white men who could see the future of Detroit, a place where she could go and toss a wrench in the gears.
There was no space between thinking of her mother, tearing up, realizing she had tears on her face, moving on. This was normal now.
Pain was real and life was suffering, but they had found a moment’s respite, a warm belly, a sense of belonging, a blurring of the sharp edges of a world that rejected them for being who they were—Black, veteran, poor, rebellious, spiritual, pregnant too early, loving too hard, wounded by the world.
But now she looked in the mirror, wondering if Kama’s loving miscegenation had produced a child who wasn’t Black enough to die with her people.
The white business class came and went as locusts; when times were flush they came to the city and ate everything, then left again to the suburbs during lean years.
Dune felt a little thrill in her belly. It was a familiar feeling, when it seems like the world can be changed by some action that happens at the scale of a few committed people.
